Basic Trope: A character goes 'x' amount of years into the future and is surprised to learn that they can't meet their future self, because they've been missing for 'x' amount of years.
- Straight: Bob McTrope uses his Spacetime-Traversing Pogo Stick to travel 20 years into the future so that he can see if he is going to be a Future Loser or a Future Badass when he is an adult. Bob enters a Bad Future upon arrival and is informed that everyone thought that he had been dead for the past 20 years because he'd gone missing.
- Exaggerated: Present!Bob McTrope makes a Time Machine and goes back in time and meets Past!Bob McTrope. Both Bobbies want to know how their future self will turn out so they take a ride forty years into the future, but only Past!Bob arrives in the future because Present!Bob and Future!Bob have never actually existed. Worse yet, Past!Bob can't go back into the past because the Spacetime-Traversing Pogo Stick was never invented by Present!Bob McTrope.
- Downplayed: Bob McTrope travels a couple days into the future, and discovers that because he went missing for those couple days, his boss is angry, his friends are worried, and his dog has run away.
- Justified: Fridge Logically, "Bob McTrope" shouldn't exist from the time he left the timeline to the time he re-entered the timeline, because he wasn't there.
- Inverted: A man from the future comes to Bob on November 8,2013 and says that he is Robert McTrope II, Bob's son. The reason Robert has come back to the past was because 11/8/13 was the exact date that his father mysteriously went missing. Due to an overloaded power source, the Spacetime-Traversing Pogo Stick explodes and sends Bob and his son several decades backwards in time, thus explaining Bob's disappearance in the future.
- Subverted: Bob goes to the future and Alice, his wife, greets him:Alice: "Robert? Is that you? You've been gone forever!"
Bob: "I have?"
Alice: "Yes! You were only supposed to be going to get some milk, what took so long?"
Bob: "Wait, what?"
In walks the real Future!Bob with a bag of groceries.
Future!Bob: "Alice, I'm home! Sorry it took so long." - Double Subverted: Turns out the Future!Bob Bob meets when he goes into the future was actually just a nearly identical Android copy of him Alice had created to cope with the lost of the real Bob several years earlier.
- Parodied: Bob McTrope goes a week into the future and discovers that he'd been considered dead. Everybody is less than thrilled that he is alive. Alice has already remarried to Greg who little Robert II already calls "papa."
- Zig Zagged: ???
- Averted: Bob McTrope goes into the future and speaks with his future self.
- Enforced: The writers want to keep time travel as consistent and logical as possible.
- Lampshaded: "You mean there's no 'me' who returns to the past and lives out those twenty years?"
- Invoked: ???
- Exploited: ???
- Defied: ???
- Discussed: ???
- Conversed: ???
- Deconstructed:
- It turns out the STPS Bob used can only jump forwards in time, never backwards. Bob jumped 20 years forward, and while he didn't age a second over that time he can never experience those 20 years for himself.
- Bob learns that something terrible was supposed to happen in those 20 years he was AWOL, but that he was/will be critical to stopping it. He can do it after returning back via Tricked Out Time, but it requires him to disappear off the radar of everyone he knows for 20 years.
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